Tag Archives: sexism

Movies, Podcast, TV

The SportsAlcohol.com Podcast: Representation and Identification in Media

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Jesse
Jesse
Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse
Latest posts by Jesse (see all)

With this year’s more diverse Oscars trying to make up ground lost by the #OscarsSoWhite debacles of previous years, and issues of representation getting more attention than ever (especially in Trump’s America), your friends at SportsAlcohol.com decided to sit down and have a conversation about representation and identification issues in popular culture. Marisa, Sara, Jon, Jesse, and Nathaniel talk about media that’s spoken to us for those reasons (be it gender, race, or geography), try to differentiate between representation and identification, and talk about all manner of movies and TV shows, past and present, including Hidden Figures, Moana, Manchester by the Sea, Moonlight, and many more. It’s one of our longest and widest-ranging conversations, with tangents on Marvel movies and self-casting and gotcha questions and college-dorm disclaimers, but we think it’s well worth listening to!

How To Listen

We are now up to SIX (6) different ways to listen to a SportsAlcohol podcast:

Sports, TV

Watching the Rio Olympics—Maybe Just Don’t?

4 Comments
Marisa
Gripes
Marisa
There are contrarians, there are iconoclasts, and then there is SportsAlcohol.com co-founder Marisa. A contraiclast? Her favorite Springsteen album came out this century, so she is basically a controversy machine.

Also, she is totally not a dude!
Marisa
Gripes
Latest posts by Marisa (see all)

I have watched exactly one night of the Rio Olympics. And, after doing so, I cannot put myself through another. Some of my problems with the Games are with the events themselves, most of them have to do with NBC broadcast, and the two combine to make the whole thing unwatchable for me; call me a curmudgeon, but I’m not the only one who thinks so, since Olympic ratings are down (although that might be because of streaming).

“But Marisa,” you say, “you never watch sports. Obviously there’s no way you’d ever be into the Olympics.” Wrong. I can muster enthusiasm for sports spectating once every couple years, because: 1) Olympic stories are often inspirational, and I’m not made of stone. I like me a good tear-jerking backstory. 2) There is something genuinely thrilling about seeing people at the peak of their athletic prowess being the best at what they do. Even I can appreciate that. 3) I have good memories of watching the Olympics with my family as a kid—together, we’d all ignore sports regularly (except for my Dad who is a Giants fan and would bother us all by hogging the TV during football season) and then get together to get excited about gymnastics or ice-skating. 4) I can certainly get into things we watch together-but-separately and tweet about; if I can do it for Grease Live!, which has source material that I actively hate, I can easily do it for the Olympics.

Basically, I want the Olympics to be like the Oscars. Sure, the broadcast has problems—the same problems every year, which will probably never be fixed—but we can all hold our nose and watch because we can enjoy it together. Yet, while I know some of you are having a good time with this year’s games, this is not like the Oscars. These are the reasons I just can’t have fun with it, not even with a saucy wink.

lher

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